Stories that make sense
Last week the weather – if you can even call it that – was so depressingly grey that today I’ve been particularly grateful for two bright days in a row. This isn’t anywhere special; this path runs from the bypass to a car park, and I’ve cropped another car park out of the photo. But just look at it.
This lunchtime I walked – briskly; there was a chilly wind – to Camley Street Natural Park. I had passed it many times, but never turned up the little side street to find the entrance until today. It’s a tiny sliver of wildness wedged between two great railway stations, St Pancras and King’s Cross – a managed wildness, but a wildness none the less.
The rushes are tall, and the trees are tall, and mostly still in leaf, and though you can look across the canal and see diners eating expensive lunches in the new King’s Cross development, or look into the canal and see a discarded shoe, and hear the whine of electric trains coming into and going out of St Pancras, it still has the sense of being a place set apart. I looked up, and saw fluffed-up bluetits; down, and saw coots dabbling; across, and saw a bold blackbird. I’ll be going back.
When we moved into this house, the front garden was entirely covered in chips of purple slate. Now it is almost entirely covered in green.
I don’t have a proper ‘before’ photo, because the whole thing was so boring that I never bothered (and when I finally came to getting rid of slate and planting plants I had very limited time and other priorities).
Here you see the boringness relieved by a pot of tulips:
You also see the irritating little weeds that grew among the stones. Shallow roots, but a pig to keep on top of and very obvious, at least when I didn’t have a magnificent tub of tulips to lead the eye elsewhere.
Last autumn, my maternity leave project (and I cannot at this distance think why I thought that this was a good idea) was transforming this into an actual garden, with intentional plants growing in the soil.
You might remember me asking on here for ideas of what to do with a small eastward facing plot that probably wasn’t going to get a lot of watering. A friend suggested that Mediterranean was the way to go. I’ve always loved herbs, so it didn’t take much effort to come up with a plan of rosemary against the house, lavender around the edges, and thyme as ground cover, with peonies (because what the hell, why not) to make the middle interesting. One of our bay trees (wedding present, 14 years ago) could go at the front corner, and what about an olive tree? And I was going to grow a passion flower up the railings.
I got Tony to gather up the slate chips (eventually a friend took them away to cover up a much less promising bit of ground). I ordered some plants from Thompson and Morgan, and quite a lot more from Norfolk Herbs. (I highly recommend Norfolk Herbs, by the way: their prices are extremely good and the delivery was swift.) On a whim, I threw some chamomile and bergamot into the order. The Thompson and Morgan stuff came in dribs and drabs; the Norfolk Herbs, all at once.
And every time I had a spare twenty minutes, when the baby had fed and gone to sleep deeply enough to notice that I’d handed her to someone else, I dashed out the front and put in another two or three plants. I’d leave the front window open so I’d hear when she started crying. I chucked a bulb or two in with each plant – tulips, daffodils, crocus, tête-à-tête, iris… Bit by bit, it got done.
We didn’t get all the slate up first go. For a long time afterwards I was picking up a dozen chips and moving them to the edge every time I went out.
Then, of course, everything went dormant over the winter, and I had to wait to see what was going to happen next.
The bulbs came first. A brave blue iris, then the tête-à-tête narcissi.
It was at this point that I started getting really happy with what I’d done. They cheered things up immensely.
On Mothering Sunday, I was presented with a pot of purple primulas. Those went in too.
Then the tulips flowered.
Meanwhile, the herbs were beginning to get going. Come May, there was still quite a bit of earth showing between the plants, but they’d woken up. The bergamot, which I’d thought had maybe died, was very enthusiastic.
We got our olive tree, too.
Over the summer, everything went absolutely bananas. The chamomile flowered and went everywhere. The bergamot came out such a gorgeous, vivid deep pink that I felt my whim was vindicated a hundred times over.
And it all kept going.
It’s less exuberant now, obviously: it’s November again. And I trimmed the chamomile back, and I’m half way round cutting off the dead lavender flowers. Even so, it’s less tidy than the slate was, but it’s much more cheerful and welcoming – not least for the bees. I was rather pleased to read, several months into this process, that:
If you want to help a variety of bees, the best way is to plant flowers that bloom sequentially from early spring to late autumn – even if you only have a window box or pots on a patio.
Which I seem to have achieved almost accidentally. I’m glad the bees are enjoying it. I certainly am.
I still have another page from a dead notebook to share with you, but this isn’t it. This, as you see, is an old envelope with a bit of knitting pattern written on it. Indeed, it fell out of a knitting book earlier today as I was finishing a baby hat – this hat:
Experienced knitters will see that this hat and the pattern on the envelope have nothing to do with each other. Indeed, as with the last post, I can remember exactly what I was trying to do: lengthen a short-sleeved blouse to turn it into a cycling jersey. I didn’t finish that; it’s still sitting at the bottom of my knitting bag.
I’m a bit of an intermittent knitter, you see. At the moment I am possessed with a wild enthusiasm for it, am telling myself that I am going to make all the socks in Cute Knits for Baby Feet, and plenty for myself as well. Since socks are a lot quicker than blouses I may even get a few finished. As you see, I have most definitely finished that hat.
Then I turned the envelope over, and I found something quite different:
Daisy’s friend is called Pippin.
The alien actress is bewildered by people mistaking her stage name for her real name or vice versa
I know exactly what that’s about too. Or, rather, exactly what those are about: these are two separate notes about two separate stories.
The first one is Daisy’s Yarn. (Here, have a PDF.) That got finished, rejected by whatever call for submissions I originally wrote it for, shopped around a bit, and picked up by a podcast that now seems to have vanished off the face of the earth. Fairly standard.
The second one is a Book Bus Story. Or it’s going to be a Book Bus Story. I don’t really have a proper link for that yet, but it’s going to be something like this, except a book. There’s a draft of that story on the page – it’s inspired, by the way, by the way that transport enthusiasts often make a careful note of 3267’s 1970 British registration number and ignore the real story – but I’m not happy with it yet. My hope is to get Book Bus Stories done so that I can sell it at next year’s Ventnor Fringe. Will that happen? Who knows? I have a lot of writing hopes and at the moment most of them just aren’t happening.
That’s not all there was to the envelope.
Invitations to my first and – so far – most glamorous literary prize event. I swanked about that quite enough back in 2017, so I won’t repeat myself now. All the same, it was quite a boost to my self-esteem to remember that I was there and I did that.
I don’t know if I can save the alien actress story. There are more words to it than that line, but there isn’t much more substance, and I have no idea what it needs. I’m almost certainly going to frog that blouse. Tony gave me one of his cycling jerseys and it fits me fine, and anyway, I haven’t been out on my road bike for well over two years.
That’s not really the point, though. The point is this: all the years when I wasn’t doing any knitting aren’t relevant now, when I am, when I’m finishing hats and socks all over the place, and looking forward to trying cables for the first time. I was knitting, and then I wasn’t, and now I am again. So I might as well trust that it’s going to be the same for writing, that I’m going to get back into it, writing notes to myself and turning them into stories within months or weeks.
Maybe there’ll be more glamorous prize nights. Or any sort of prize nights. I don’t mind. At the moment I’d just like to be sure that I’m going to get another book done – and I can’t be sure, because the only way to get a book done is to do it, and at the moment I’m not doing it. But I’m glad this particular fossil came to the surface: it makes me believe that I can.
I’ve been clearing out my desk. Well, both my desks, actually: we’re all moving around at work so I’ve taken the opportunity to chuck quite a lot of stuff. But I meant my desk at home, the bottom drawer of which is full of exercise books containing longhand drafts of my three novels and quite a lot else besides.
It isn’t quite so full now. Having decided that the literary critics of the future are unlikely to care enough to compare my early drafts with the finished products, and that I need the space, I’ve started ripping out and recycling pages. I’ve been glancing through them as I go, though. I’ve noticed a few things: the mild shock when I come across a character with what is now the wrong name; the surprise when I find snippets from projects which I’d have said shared nothing with each other butted up on facing pages; the odd work-related note. I didn’t think I’d started A Spoke In The Wheel before I’d got Speak Its Name done and dusted, but there are Polly and Vicki just across the page from Peter and… who’s Gina? Oh, right, yes.
Then there’s this. It’s a sort of warm-up exercise, trying to get myself into the right frame of mind – that is, the character’s frame of mind – to write one of the trickier scenes in Speak Its Name. I can’t remember now whether I felt particularly stuck and needed to write something that wasn’t the scene to get myself going, or whether I just knew that it had to be good, but I knew immediately what this was all about.
Lydia is fed up with Colette because:
- she doesn’t appreciate how easy she has it
- she never washes up
- she is pressurising [sic] her to come out
- it was her idea to get Becky involved
- it would never have happend if Will hadn’t found out, this whole house…
- so scared of confrontation, so conflict averse, never talk about anything
- unilateral decisions about the two of them
- always cooks late
- bigoted about science
- thinks Lydia’s friends are stupid and lets it show
- this house is not as much fun as she thought it was going to be
- and she hates being beholden to people
- in a way she’s responsible for Lydia having to think about any of it
- Lydia still doesn’t quite believe a F/F relationship can be godly, blames Colette for getting her into it
- she is just so noble and self-sacrificial it’s not true
- why both, when they can’t be married?
That’s Colette who’s just so noble and self-sacrificial, as if you couldn’t guess. I do like the way that this is a mixture of the little day-to-day annoyances and the big existential incompatibilities. And I’m pleased that almost all these themes are still in play in The Real World, even though things have moved on. At least my characterisation’s consistent.
Then down the bottom of the page I’ve written:
give them something to laugh about
“coming out party”
The coming out party comes quite a bit later, in the finished work; apparently it was very much connected to this scene in my mind – but I’d forgotten: that’s what this row is about. I’m not sure about ‘give them something to laugh about’; it might be what turned into ‘He shall have his resignation’. Which really does come quite a bit later – and is very much connected to the ‘coming out party’.
Interestingly, the next thing I wrote wasn’t the row. It was the making up. Over the page:
Lydia stayed in bed until past
teneleven, until she could be sure that Colette would have left the house. She had been awake for hours, had watched the narrow line of pale December light creep across the ceiling, listened to the rain spitting pettily against the window…
Which isn’t all that different from what ended up in the finished book. Page 214 of the paperback, if you’re playing along at home:
Dawn broke and dulled to drizzle. Lydia stayed in bed until past eleven, until she could be sure that Colette would have left the house; she lay there watching the narrow line of light creep across the ceiling, listening to the rain spitting listlessly against the window…
Now I catch myself thinking about why I made those changes; if they were successful; whether I’d do the same thing again. Which wasn’t going to be the point of this blog post. Apologies, hypothetical literary critics of the future; that’s all you’re going to get. Most of this volume’s already gone for recycling, and that presumably included the actual row (now page 210-214).
Which was going to be my point: that little exercise worked, even if it wasn’t quite the way I was expecting, or indeed, remembered. I’ll try to remember, next time I’m stuck on or intimidated by a scene: write it down, write down everything that’s going on in the point of view character’s head, wind it up and wind it up, and then – let it go. Stand back and let the scene write itself. Even if it wasn’t the one you were expecting.
It felt rather appropriate to be sitting in the conservatory yesterday, looking out at the roses still just about blooming and ripe apples on the trees, drinking the tea that came with this season’s Ffern perfume, and embroidering a reindeer into a baby hat. Today we rotated the mattress. It’s not exactly a ritual; it’s just that we’re more likely to remember to do it if we link it with the solstices and equinoxes.
I tend to mark the changing of the seasons by the cross-quarter days (I find it less depressing that way) so for me, autumn began at Lammas, at the beginning of August. That doesn’t mean that the half-way point isn’t important, though. It still looks very green outside, but when I look a second time there are a few red and orange leaves, and tonight there’s a patter of rain on the conservatory roof, and the promise of more.
A family trip around the Isle of Wight on the Waverley. I love to encounter venerable old craft still joyfully doing the job they were built to do, and Waverley is pretty much the epitome of that. It was a gorgeous day, too.
Several times it seemed that everything was dreadful, and it turned out I needed to have eaten something half an hour ago. You’d think I’d have learned by now, but no.
Also, two rail replacement buses in one journey seems excessive.
Staying at whichever Premier Inn is most convenient for the trip. The staff always seem to love babies regardless of how much toast ends up on the floor, and if you tick the box requesting a cot, then lo and behold, a cot appears.
Consider Phlebas (Iain M. Banks). It is very White Bloke Science Fiction, but I am enjoying it very much. It feels extremely visual; cinematic, you might say. It’s big both in page count and in imagination.
When that all got a bit too exciting for four in the morning I returned to the Chalet School. I have got to The Chalet School Does It Again and slowed right down. Prunella annoys me, and also I find it a little disheartening because we have got to Switzerland, which feels like the beginning of the end, and yet there is still half the series to go. And even though it’s quite a while before the books start getting really bad (or really bonkers) Joey’s already become irritating.
I started The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (Deborah Moggach, original title These Foolish Things) on the train south, but haven’t got very far with it. (I haven’t seen the film.)
Finished: one pair of baby socks. Started: one baby hat (for all the good it will do). This will also be on four double-pointed needles, but at the moment I’m knitting earflaps on two.
I caught up on all of this season of Only Connect and finished Rob and Rylan’s Grand Tour, several months after I began it.
Apart from all the edges of the Isle of Wight, an art exhibition examining the Russian propaganda machine in the Crypt at St Pancras new church. ‘Did you like it?’ the attendant asked me on the way out. I said that ‘like’ wasn’t exactly the word, but it was fascinating and thought-provoking.
Also the inhabitants of the extremely luxurious aviary/rabbit hutch in Victoria Park in Portsmouth. I was particularly taken with one very raffish looking bunny with lopsided ears and a furry face. It looked as if it ought to have a smoking cap and a hookah.
Lots of wildlife from the train. Heron. Cormorant. Deer. And sunflowers.
Trying to keep the wisteria within bounds.
My grandfather and the rest of the Paddle Steamer Preservation Society. All my family, actually.
Another badge for the camp blanket. I don’t usually collect duplicates, but this is the third from the Waverley. When I’ve sewn it on (ha!) I intend to tell you about all three.
Consider Phlebas is, I think, effective in a cumulative kind of a way rather than in any one particular moment, but here’s a line from one of the most effective bits.
It was like the biggest wave in the universe, rendered in scrap metal, sculpted in grinding junk; and beyond and about it, over and through, cascades of flashing, glittering ice and snow swept down in great slow veils from the cliff of frozen water beyond.
Nothing much. Time to draw breath.
About time I did one of these again…
A trip to Sheffield for the annual Ultreya GB. I missed last year’s, though I hadn’t intended to (in retrospect, my ideas of what would be possible with a small baby were somewhat unrealistic), and it was good to be back. It was quite a different experience: I was very tired (see below) and also I don’t usually spend the event climbing up and down all the available steps in the cathedral. But it all came together for me in the last hymn – a very lively Amazing Grace – with the banners lined up and the baby clapping along in delight.
Some delightful fellow passengers and some railway staff who may in fact have been angels.
A month’s worth of interrupted sleep has trashed my immune system, the nursery germs have pounced, and I was very wobbly earlier in the week. And I’m not a nice person when I’m ill and tired.
Two hours and forty minutes on a train, each way. The way back was more trying than the way out.
Sloggi long pants. Do they make me feel about a hundred and two? Yes, particularly the beige ones. Is it worth it to make bare legs bearable in hot weather? Absolutely. (Yes, I am aware of the Snag ‘chub rub’ shorts. Quite apart from the hideousness of the name, I can’t see that synthetic material next the skin would help in any way, however much I like their tights.)
Quite a bit! Having read She Who Became The Sun earlier in the summer, I picked up He Who Drowned The World (Shelley Parker-Chan) when it was on offer a few weeks ago. Equally fun (in its extremely dark way); the magical realism has more of an active influence on the plot this time round. I wasn’t convinced it stuck the landing, but the overall experience was sufficiently enjoyable to render that largely irrelevant.
Also on offer recently was Sea of Tranquility (Emily St John Mandel). This was a bit of a disappointment. I read Station Eleven early in 2020 and was very struck by how vivid and alien the post-apocalyptic world was. Sea of Tranquility, by contrast, all seemed extremely twenty-first century in terms of the way that the characters thought and spoke, with the different settings just so much window-dressing. The time travel plot also didn’t work for me; I think the aim was to subvert the usual clichés, but it just felt like a cop-out.
And Kobo also suggested Consider Phlebas (Iain M. Banks) for 99p, so I decided it was probably time I tried the Culture series.
Yesterday I started One Pair of Feet (Monica Dickens) which is very entertaining so far.
Then today I picked up N or M (Agatha Christie) because it was on the floor. I am less fond of Tommy and Tuppence than I am of most of Christie’s other series detectives, so missed this one on last year’s epic re-read. But I breezed through it and then picked up Postern of Fate to remind myself what happened to the family afterwards.
Nothing to speak of, though I have been doing a little worldbuilding in my head.
One ridiculously huge baby sock, and now most of one more sensible one. I also converted a little binder into an earring holder (I will try to remember to post pictures of this).
The Paralympics, on and off. I was pleased to catch Sarah Storey’s umpteenth win, as Channel 4 also showed a decent chunk of the race. (I have found both the BBC and Channel 4 very frustrating in their tendency to show fragments of an event that have a Great British Medal Hope and nothing else. But it’s probably just as well this year, because I’ve had very little telly time.)
Ely Photographic Club’s exhibition at Babylon Arts. There were a few pieces there that made me smile, and several that were clearly very technically skilled even if not really my thing. Also, Sheffield cathedral.
A very hot vegetable curry: the veg box contained a bag of Padrón peppers, every single one of which was the ‘really quite spicy’ variety, so unsuitable for serving as a main/side dish in the usual way. Not one of my most successful dishes, though I’m pleased with it as a creative response to a problem.
This year’s fancy Magnum flavours, an impulse buy when they were on offer in Co-op. I’m still not entirely convinced that ice cream and popping candy is a happy combination, but it’s different, I’ll give it that.
We continue our WalkRuns (being runs that are in fact mostly walks).
Loads of dragonflies this year. Or possibly damselflies. They don’t stay still long enough for me to be able to tell the difference.
Ripe apples. I’ve pruned all the apple trees bar one. The next job is to take out the dead box (or was it privet?) bushes that got eaten by beetles last year.
Cursillo. It’s totally bonkers, but there is space in there for people to be Christians and also themselves, and that is something I was missing for a long time and something for which I continue to be grateful.
And, needless to say, every night when I get to sleep before midnight and get to wake up after six.
I found a little makers’ cooperative shop in Sheffield and picked up a fabric patch (to join the several I have still to sew on), a sticker, and a pair of teal stud earrings.
Monica Dickens, weighing up her options:
The Land Army? One saw oneself picking apples in a shady hat, or silhouetted against the skyline with a couple of plough horses, but a second look showed one tugging mangel-wurzels out of the frozen ground at five o’clock on a bitter February morning.
The emerging routine is slightly disrupted by a committee meeting, and then at the weekend there’s an exciting sea voyage. And that’s the last excursion for a little while, and that’s probably just as well. I might even update this blog more.
This dress was originally meant for a wedding on 6 July. I sat up most of the night on the 4th (election night, you will remember). Eventually, round about the time the Labour majority was official as opposed to just obvious, I conceded defeat myself. The smocking was all finished (I’d made life hard for myself by doing the back as well as the front) but there was no way I was going to get the seams and the hem and the buttons done. I went to bed and was up again a few hours later for the drive to Exeter (not with me behind the wheel, I hasten to add). The wedding was the day after, and was a great success. The baby wore Smocked Dress 1.
As I remarked back when I finished that one, there were several things I did differently. The main one was making the pleats half the size, which instantly made the whole thing look tidier. The other thing about this dress is that it’s shaped entirely by the smocking. If you were to take all the pleats out (please don’t; it takes forever) you’d find that it’s made of three rectangles, one at the front and two at the back. The shape of the armholes is formed by judicious use of more and less elastic embroidery stitches. I smocked the whole thing then turned in the edges at the neck and armholes. In that sense it’s a zero waste pattern. I’m torn between feeling vaguely virtuous about that and a little bit sad there aren’t any scraps to use for patchwork.
I didn’t quite get it done in time for the baby’s birthday. But she wore it to her birthday party, then to mine, then to her great-aunt’s. Smocking is quite stretchy, so if only the weather holds up it might get a few more outings. For the moment, though, I’m attempting to knit a sock.
This summer I rather unexpectedly found myself coordinating and curating an exhibition. This is a first for me, and I’m rather pleased with the result.
Ventnor Fringe was on. I was going to be there. So was 3267, in the guise of the Book Bus. So far, so normal. I’d missed last year, the baby being just too tiny, and was looking forward to returning to my summer arts hit.
Ventnor Fringe has been getting bigger every year, in terms of both space and time, and this year it was going to be ten days long. It was only going to be reasonably practicable to make the bookshop happen for four days of that, and the preferred distribution of those four days was both Fridays and both Saturdays. Which left a five-day gap in the middle. Perhaps we could have some sort of an exhibition to fill it…
Such was the situation as described to me in mid-June, and to my delight the creative bit of my brain, which has been in and out and mostly out for the past two years, immediately rushed in. Various other people were having ideas too. Brilliant! My brain was coming up with a grand overarching idea to pull it all together:
This bus is usually a bookshop. So what do you get if you take the books out of a bookshop? And what if that space is something that has seen a lot in its time?
A title appeared. Espace Libre. Free Space. Maybe Espace Livre? No, trying too hard. Let it speak for itself. This is just another way to express what I’ve been trying to do with Book Bus Stories, assuming I ever finish the thing. If I had finished the thing it would make an exhibition in itself. But it could make a little part of one, maybe…
I angled for the job of coordinating it all – perhaps a trifle ambitious, trying to do it all from the mainland and with a baby clinging to my legs, but I wasn’t going to let that worry me – and the rest of the gang were extremely happy to let me do it.
So off I went. I selected (extremely select) quotations from my father’s accounts of how he got the bus this side of the Channel in the first place. I polished up three of my own Book Bus Stories to make a small display – and commit myself to finishing the rest of the damn things in time for next year. I spent quite a lot of money on boards and various forms of adhesive. I bought chain and cable ties in the DIY bit of our wonderful local department store, and if the assistant thought it was in any way weird she didn’t let on. I printed out everything I’d written. I posted the whole lot to Ventnor. And I chased and chased and chased the other contributors, and/or my family members who had undertaken to organise the other contributors for me.
Then I got to the Isle of Wight and spent a frantic couple of evenings sticking photos and cards to boards, or, in one case, making holes in a board with a corkscrew and attaching books with string, chain, and cable ties, while the baby was in bed. And we moved the whole lot onto the bus on Sunday morning.
In short, I had a lovely time.
This was a combination of the kind of project and people organising I do in my day job, and the kind of creative work I do in my free time, and it was the first time since I’d gone on maternity leave that I’d got my teeth into either of them in a big way. My brain had come back, and, since I’d been a bit worried that it had dissolved and dribbled out of my ears some time between COVID and quickening, this was incredibly exciting. I can do this kind of thing. Not only is this reassuring in the context of my return to work next week, it’s also encouraging to think that I might be able to return to some of the three or four books I have been attempting to write on and off since 2021.
I’m not going to have a huge amount more free time in which to use reclaimed creative powers. I get a couple of train journeys and a couple of lunch hours every week, and all the fruit trees need pruning. I will aim to get something done. I hope to post here more frequently, too. We’ll see how that goes. In the meantime, here’s a look at The Book Bus: Espace Libre.
Kathleen Jowitt 